the real batman is more frightening than anything on TV
I met him on my way to a rally in a town called Liberty
He was riding on the back of a giant ugly toothy bat.
Together we screamed – me and my terrified cousin Matt.
A photo would not do these feelings justice, I told the other kids.
This bat was humungous, he could have put mammoths on the skids.
They laughed at me, thought I was lying, until the bat flew into sight
The real batman’s laughing voice was the last thing I heard that night.
they are massive, shaggy, colossal, one of a kind
gigantic creatures found as fossils
an extinct group of elephants
we call them wooly, northern or Siberian mammoths
they hailed from Africa, Asia, Europe and North America
Mammoths appeared in indigenous people’s folklore
In Siberia, it was believed they were responsible for
creating the world
One tribe believed mammoths guarded the underworld
they are magical and mystical, and over the top wonderful
no matter what your beliefs are
lively lumbering lions
meandering muscular mammoths
nightfall’s notorious newts
oscillating ornery octopi
playful plushy platypus
quintessential quibbling quail
responsibly respecting restless reptiles
You ruled your world
The largest creature around
But that was so long ago
Extinction found you
Lost to all of time
But one was found
Hidden in Lake Pleasant
Just fragile bones
Locked away in a museum
But now you are remembered
A baseball team honors you
May the Moon Mammoths live forever
XIII/IX/MMXXV
LRET
What kind of pet did Harry bring home?
Not from Alaska, Italy, Corinth or Rome
Massie and mastadonic, my mama said.
But aren’t all wooly mammoths kind of dead?
Huge woolly mammoths have long been extinct
Why create creatures that are to T-Rex linked?
They were frozen in ice
Don't remake them from mice
Am I clear or should I be more succinct?
Heaven has not left
the long dead bone,
alert mouse whiskers,
still move the seven seas.
At the beginning and the end
there is nothing to come,
that has not come and is.
Mammoths stride
a thousand leagues,
over a single blade of grass.
One small sparrow -
an Ark for infinity.
All that is,
is but one single event.
The speckled hen
lays worlds within worlds.
The unbridled beaks of seagulls,
unlock a book,
of common prayer.
Here we go again -
another crazy form to try - this time
a 'Yabba Dabba Do' or so it's called.
The jury's out; I can't say I'm enthralled.
I've not made a connection to the rhyme
or figured out how best with such a silly form to dabble.
I guess it truly is no more absurd
than having wooly mammoths pumping gas,
or dinosaurs and humans there en masse,
or roasting pterodactyls like they're birds.
Wilma, Fred, Barney and Betty, relegated to the past;
methinks this jab will do the same, and will be my first and last.
----------
Probably ought to give it a better shot, but this one is a 'Yabba Dabba Do'
12 lines: xabba xcddc ee, with 5/10/10/10/10 15/10/10/10/10 15/15
The form description at poet's collective was not that clear -
repeated the abba in the pattern, but then the example did not
I don't have a return ticket
not sure if this train
is coming from somewhere or going onward.
In the next seat a 'mick' relative,
we converse in a grunting verse.
Rough hands caked with unspoken words
indicate long pauses.
On the move trying to recall
something familiar, a town, a stretch
of passing scenery. A once fractured memory,
Some kid is beating a tin toy drum
I think it is me, his short pants are dark blue,
they are too tight;
he is going to the seaside one day.
The child is annoying.
A journey battles on.
it whistles through the bygone:
will someone meet us in loco parentis?
I am an outgrown poet full of the Irish,
I am a jigsaw piece
for the numbed seekers of unfilled holes.
This is a video game,
this is a play station
with play passengers
getting on and leaving.
Bareboned is the bodkin that grooves
a map far from anywhere.
Passengers stare out of my window
I begin to count the eyes.
I have much time to ponder,
to wonder if this rattling line
has an end
or perhaps has been pulled up
long ago
by ice Mammoths?
Museums are quiet except
For crackling parquet floors,
Wooden squares, a game board:
Checkers or maybe chess
Of various right angle, grain striations.
Parallel to paintings in oil, red lines
Begin a court for pickup basketball.
But whether subjects of famous battles
Or romances between animals and gods,
They are stuck in a frozen frame moment
Like mammoths in some La Brea Art Pit
It is this instant we are to see anew
Each brush stroke, a wisp of hair,
A dab of white, a cloud condensing,
I lean close.
An unseen alarm makes a statue come alive,
A funerary, votive docent who guards
Mesopotamian and Egyptian antiquities.
She curses me in hieroglyphs translated
And dictated from an Old Kingdom tongue.
My crime: too close to art.
As if my admission, and apology
Were not punishment enough.
I could have cast my eyes
At strangers surrounding me.
Vatican visitors are permitted
To touch the Pieta statue for luck.
Suspecting it has only so many
Touches before marble succumbs,
It’s luckier not to take a chance. (1/30/02)
Sails of snow
Hoisted
To the roar of northern wind
Wires wild
Leashed to masts
Banging like spoons on pots and pans
Sea of Earth lurching
Beneath
The creaking planks of our house
On we go
Tossed and turned
The bow of our kitchen
Cutting through slaps of whitecaps
Windows sinking
Chimney smoke whipping from the rooftops
Bushes plumed and weighed down
To their knees
With buckets bailed of snow
Swaying low
Like the last herd of wooly mammoths
Dragging themselves down the street
A march to oblivion
The storm subsides after three nights and two days
Though the trees continue to throw snowballs
On their own
We emerge
Michiganians
Terrified sailors
Transformed
To butlers and maids
Sweeping and dusting
Shoveling and chipping
The destruction
From the wrecked decks of our driveways
Signaling at dusk to one another
Through flashlight Morse code
All is well
All is well
We survived.
A dark and faceless bedroom
consents to talk with me awhile.
The brain buzzes on
being its usual endless
blunt toothed saw.
The body belches and rumbles
as it tirelessly works to produce
the odd snort or snore.
All is a normal stasis on an escalator
speeding to nowhere,
Just the random outtakes
from under-rehearsed thoughts
dropping like dying mammoths
into tar pits of forgetfulness.
Beyond all these moving parts
is a soundless voice,
a voice I realize I had left somewhere
returning now to show me
where a loss had occurred.
It was there at a bifurcation
in a nowhere place.
that two voices grew deaf to each other,
but now in this instant
the voices have become
a synchronized dance of one.
I am translucently unilingual
through my mouth and ears.
An oceanic speech
funneled through a shell of self.
This is how the All speaks, said one voice.
This is how the All listen, said the other.
A third voice said:
and here is the holiness of silence.
I have to say, this isolation doesn't appear to be affecting me at all.
I was thinking... The wind must come from somewhere.
Do the trees make the wind with their ceaseless moving around?
“KKKeeeeepp STILL!!” I shriek at the trees from my bedroom window but they pretend not to hear. Science says trees can talk to each other over some secret, underground, filament-like network - so I know the ba$tards are listening.
And I don’t know about this new generation of birds - these tearless, happy birds that chirp just to be fashionable. They annoy me when they pretend to be unaware of the value of silence.
“Shut UP!” I scream at a speckled bird who stares down at me like I’m insignificant.
“Yeah, the woolly mammoths ignored us too,” I remind it.
I give it the two-fingered, back and forth “Yeah, I’m watching you” gesture.
Then it just chirps right past me, as if I don't exist. Aaarrrgghhh!
So I give that bird the bird.
M is for mammoth, big as a barn,
with long woolly hair that's much warmer than yarn.
He's 15 feet tall from his toes to his head,
(much too big to keep in the gardening shed)
He's got really big tusks and he weighs 13 ton,
and he stomps on saber tooth tigers for fun.
He wandered the plains munching bushes and grass,
when a blizzard surprised him and froze his fat mass.
5000 years later when the weather was nice,
it thawed just a bit and he burst from the ice!
The scientists flocked round to skin and de-bone him,
with a bunch right behind who were hankerin' to clone him.
If the cloning succeeds and the Doc's have their way,
We'll be hip deep in mammoths the very next day!
Then us gardening folk can despair of our broccoli,
cause its tough enough dealing with crows by the flockly,
and raccoons by night, and woodchuck by day,
and running 'round chasing Mizz Bunny away.
We all know for a fact that no chicken wire fence,
will keep out a mammoth. (they're just too immense)
Trailing steel cans
and rolling out their
long rags.
The morning is a frost
broken in clamorous relief.
Frayed holes in their eaten
gloves carry a crushed chore,
a rotted job bundled in skins
of wet plastics.
They emerge from a deep
hidden hour
riding the back jaws
of neglected mammoths.
A storm hammers
in the scrape of their tongues.
The dogs lunge
for their voices.
They remove what lingers too long
from our past.
Published Black Buzzard Press 1982
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